890 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms: World War II
declaration of war against the Axis powers. Tens of thousands of Indians left
reservations for jobs in war industries. Exposed for the first time to urban life
and industrial society, many chose not to return to the reservations after the
war ended (indeed, the reservations did not share in wartime prosperity). Some
Indian veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college after the war, an
opportunity that had been available to very few Indians previously.
Asian-Americans in Wartime
Asian-Americans’ war experience was paradoxical. More than 50,000—the
children and grandchildren of immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the
Philippines—fought in the army, mostly in all-Asian units. With China an
ally in the Pacific war, Congress in 1943 ended decades of complete exclusion
by establishing a nationality quota for Chinese immigrants. The annual limit
of 105 hardly suggested a desire for a large-scale influx. But the image of the
Chinese as gallant fighters defending their country against Japanese aggres-
sion called into question long-standing racial stereotypes. As in the case of
Mexican-Americans, large numbers of Chinese-Americans moved out of ethnic
ghettos to work alongside whites in jobs on the home front.
The experience of Japanese-Americans was far different. Many Americans
viewed the war against Germany as an ideological struggle. But both sides saw
the Pacific war as a race war. Japanese propaganda depicted Americans as a
self-indulgent people contaminated by ethnic and racial diversity as opposed
to the racially “pure” Japanese. In the United States, long-standing prejudices
and the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor combined to produce an unprece-
dented hatred of Japan. “In all our history,” according to one historian, “no foe
has been detested as were the Japanese.” Government propaganda and war
films portrayed the Japanese foe as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes—bestial and
subhuman. They blamed Japanese aggression on a violent racial or national
character, not, as in the case of Germany and Italy, on tyrannical rulers.
About 70 percent of Japanese-Americans in the continental United States
lived in California, where they dominated vegetable farming in the Los Ange-
les area. One-third were first-generation immigrants, or issei, but a substantial
majority were nisei—American-born, and therefore citizens. Many of the lat-
ter spoke only English, had never been to Japan, and had tried to assimilate
despite prevailing prejudice. But the Japanese-American community could not
remain unaffected by the rising tide of hatred. The government bent over back-
ward to include German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the war effort.
It ordered the arrest of only a handful of the more than 800,000 German and
Italian nationals in the United States when the war began. But it viewed every
person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy.